Deus' Intentions

Deus' intentions have still remained a mystery. We know from Perfect Works that he was attempting to return to Lost Jerusalem, but why?

Personally, I think it was going to be about filling a role as a demiurge figure (since Deus is obvious symbolic of the demiurge), and it would have attempted start humanity anew in their home, with it as their sort of God, filling in in the place of the Wave Existence. We know from creating Miang and whatnot, that he is a "mother god" figure, so having it fill this role to the humans of Lost Jerusalem would be fitting. It's destroyed at the end though, so its dreams will never become a reality.

Now only if we had Episode VI...

Without really all that much info about Deus' origins, it's hard to gauge its intentions. I always sort of saw it as some sort of Jenova-like monster that was either created or captured in a lab with an immense lifespan and the ability to influence everything around it within a certain degree. The crew of the Eldrige seemed pretty terrified of it, so I suppose I'm more willing to believe its intentions were malicious, but it was probably just scared and woke up caged. I haven't had a chance to read the PW scanslations yet, though, so I'm most likely entirely wrong.

It's been like ten years since I played this game and I still don't know what all was going on. I'm not a gnostic expert, I just do light reading on the subject in wikipedia from time to time.

The demiurge in gnostic mythos was created by Sophia (not to be confused with Elly's pre-incarnation named after this concept). The demiurge was isolated and unaware of his mother or the other levels of existence. If Deus is essentially a man-made demiurge, then perhaps his motivations are to find and perceive his creator.

This makes parallels to Xenosaga even more interesting, since the introduction of Mary Magdeline as female representation of god's power invokes the concept of Sophia. Although the whole animus/lamegeton/U-DO/Wave existence/UMN/whatever thing got really fuzzy after a while, so who even knows at this point.

katimus wrote:I always sort of saw it as some sort of Jenova-like monster

I always saw parallels with Jenova as well. I think there was definitely some influence from Final Fantasy VII, since they were both in development at the same time.

Xenogears essentially was the original pitch for FF7.  Kaori Tanaka (Soraya Saga) created and Takahashi pitched the original idea that later became Xenogears first as Final Fantasy 7.  Square thought it was too sci-fi for a Final Fantasy title, but allowed them to produce an independent title instead.  Obviously though, certain themes and ideas were carried into FF7 from the original pitch. Tanaka described her original idea as "a young soldier of fortune with multiple personalities" which describes Cloud better than Fei, really.  

She says that after this decision, she came up with the Deus/Miang idea, and Takahashi refined it into the cosmic love story that Xenogears turned out to be.  This suggests the Deus idea was formed after the split from Final Fantasy 7, but the Deus/Jenova concept is still similar enough that I think maybe these ideas ended up in different forms in FF7 as well.

More info, with the sources for references:
http://xenoverse.xenotensei.com/history/history_of_xeno_part01.htm#origins

Reminds me that I need to play Xenogears again, the story is just too damn complicated. And the mention of the demiurge reminds me of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.

I think overall with Deus, if he was a sort of alien or 'lab' figure, would have the response akin to what Stephen Hawking once said about such life forms. Anything that is wholly of power above another creature will naturally try to dominate that creature.

We don't know why Deus wanted to go to Lost Jerusalem and the funny thing is That Xeno3 ended with the trip to Lost Jerusalem, like some sort of convergence! Will we know what happened on Lost Jerusalem one day?  

^and the Earth might have only just relaxed after all those restless human jerks have finally left it alone.

I have yet to read any of the supplement materials and such - I've finished my first playthrough today after all - but from what I've seen in the game itself, there was absolutely nothing said about what Deus was trying to do.

A (very) brief rundown of what the AI's objectives were supposed to be put in it by its creators (there is always room for unfortunate oversights or deliberate sabotage in such stories) was given, but seeing as how the intro video went, I don't think it is safe to assume that they remained unchanged after the contact with Zohar.

[WARNING: dangerous amounts of headcanon below this point]

I like to think it is something far simpler though. It just tickles my sense of dark irony to headcanon that Deus did not take any of that demiurge business in consideration when it did what it did and just tacked on religious imagery and words on its creations because the people that made it were probably more religious than is healthy (sounds like some of the characters in Xenosaga, if you ask me) and just programmed it this way.

Humans being humans found some hidden meaning and far-reaching unfathomable schemes where there wasn't any. The fact that it pretty much created all the humans that roamed the planet and was literally seen as God by those who were tasked with keeping the plan on track while it was deactivated certainly didn't help though.

Why produce humans if one wants them do anything but wage war and fudge up ecosystems? I can only assume that Deus didn't have much choice in the matter and worked with the best thing it had available at that time - the original Fei. (And maybe Elly. The game is really unclear on this part.) The specifications for hordes of angel-themed robot (cyborg?) nanomachine mooks were provided by Deus' creators, sitting in the databanks looking pretty, all ready for production, yes, but the decisive actions by the unnamed captain in the intro likely made it impossible to produce any practical amount with the resources Deus had available at the time.

So it grabbed what it had on hand, adjusted the 'blueprints' to better suit the task, hardcoded a set of directives that would enable its newest batch of minions to complete it without direct supervision and shut down to conserve resources/energy/whatever Deus runs on.

I think it would be logical to assume that Deus is incapable of actually 'creating' anything - all that was shown to be produced by the thing was made from already existing blueprints and adjusted to the current needs - at the point in time it was shown in the game. Maybe it is not beyond its capability to start developing things on its own, but Deus had been online for a very short amount of time before it got deader than dead, so who knows?

(Maybe the usual way humans develop when plopped on a planet and left to their own devices - generating a lot of inorganic junk natural flora and fauna is unable to recycle quickly enough like glass, plastic, etc and choking the life out said flora and fauna in the process - is a slow and steady method of terraforming that turns the planet in a pile of resources all ready for the taking. Such a thing would likely suit Lavos much more than Deus though.)